The Latest Silicon Valley Visionaries

SDForum presented its visionary awards Wednesday night to five people whose ideas on technology have turned out to be right, so far.

The annual event is hosted by Heidi Roizen, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and her husband Dr. David Mohler and provides the Silicon Valley elite with a chance to peek at their house in Woodside. It’s designed like a Tuscan villa, with animal heads in the entryway, and the urinal in the Moroccan guest house is tiled with pictures of Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. If any of the 200-plus guests were startled, they didn’t show it.

The award ceremony took place in the garden, which was set up with tables and a buffet and was patrolled by the family dogs. Here are the winners:

– Forest Baskett, a venture capitalist at NEA whose research into computer graphics became a prototype for the first Sun workstation. Baskett said he’s always tried to hire and work for people who are smarter than he is, even if that puts him in the bottom 10% at evaluation time. Lately he’s investing in clean technology companies because he believes wind and solar power can free us from dependence on oil.

–Diane Greene, a former Naval architect and the CEO of VMware, which created a market for virtualization on PCs. She is also one of Silicon Valley’s few female CEOs. She said VMware shows how great technology can build a great company, also how it’s possible to get acquired by a bigger company (EMC) with a different culture and still remain unfettered.

–Reed Hastings, a former Peace Corps volunteer who got a degree in computer science and founded Netflix. To keep his employees creative, he lets them take as much vacation as they want. Hastings was the only winner who said he wasn’t sure whether he deserved the award because his vision hasn’t come true. He’s still waiting for Web browsers to be on all TV sets so Netflix can be the movie channel.

-Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs, who founded Qualcomm to commercialize his CDMA technology for digital cell phones. He said his high school counselor told him to study restaurant management because there was no future in math or science. He tried it but switched majors and ended up on the faculty of MIT. He’s also a philanthropist.

–Steven Levy, a journalist who’s written about technology since the early 1980s, most recently for Newsweek. He just joined Wired magazine. He used to worry that he was late to covering Silicon Valley, he said, but has decided that’s no longer true.